We publish a complete free-to-read short story on the web every Thursday. The newest story is below. See all stories.
Backflow River had two small towns on its north side and three on the south side. If you wanted to cross the river, there was no bridge, only Dumbo’s boat. So, when people got to the river crossing, they yelled: ‘Bring the boat over, Dumbo!’ And Dumbo put down his water pipe and poled across as hard as he could. He was not as strong as he had been, but there was a hawser strung across the river which the boat was roped to, so it was unlikel...
Recent Posts
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The chairman of China South Publishing & Media Group, Gong Shuguang, offers advice to international publishers who want to work with Chinese companies.
Yu Xinqiao and Yunte Huang at the Brooklyn Library, March 17
Born in Fujian and raised in Zhejiang, Yu Xinqiao is one of the most popular and important poets in China today. After calling for a “Chinese Renaissance Movement” in 1993, Xinqiao was subsequently jailed for eight years. His poem “If I Have to Die,” set to music, has become an enormous arena-rock hit and stirring anthem of defiance. Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan and other works, is the editor of the new collection The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature: Writings from the Mainland in the Long Twentieth Century, a panoramic literary anthology that includes writers from Nobel laureates Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan to Bei Dao, Yu Hua, Yu Xinqiao and others. Curated and hosted by Anderson Tepper.
As we announced last month, on March 14th London's Free Word Centre will be hosting "That Damned Thing She Said", a speed bookclubbing event at which translators Roddy Flagg, Nicky Harman, Emily Jones and Helen Wang will be discussing short stories by authors Feng Tang, Fu Yuli, Li Jingrui and Liu Qingbang. (You can find out more and purchase tickets here.)
We are delighted to announce that we will be holding the same event in Beijing as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival on March 12th. The China line-up: Eric Abrahamsen, Dave Haysom, Nick Stember, plus one more participant TBC.
Tickets are available to purchase now online or at the Bookworm.
More…
By David Haysom, February 21 '16, 6a.m.
Back in 2009 the Paper Republic team put together this dream-list of untranslated Chinese novels. It seems like it's about time to revisit the original list, see what progress has been made, and put together a new 2016 edition!
We're calling on you, our readers, to make your suggestions! Tell us about the Chinese novels you'd most like to see translated. Get your suggestions to us by Sunday 28th February, and we'll publish the 2016 dream-list in the first week of March.
More…
By David Haysom, February 21 '16, 12a.m.
Feb 19-21: Events at Taipei Int’l Book Exhibition
Featuring authors Fan Xiaoqing, Qian Zhongshu, Dai Lai, Wang Dajin, Yan Huajun and Huang Fan.
More…
By Helen Wang, February 18 '16, 2:10a.m.
Ethnic ChinaLit February 2016 Newsbriefs
Uyghur Author Alat Asem's Novella Tapped for Translation into English . . . Zha Jianying on Ji Xianlin's newly translated The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (牛棚杂忆, 季羡林著) . . . Perhat Tursun, le Salman Rushdie de Chine se remet enfin à écrire . . . overseas sales of Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel, The Three-body Problem (三体, 刘慈欣著) reportedly top 100,000 . . . open letter from int'l publishers, booksellers and free speech advocates calling for HK head honcho Leung Chun-ying to defend press freedoms in the face of China's forced disappearances and detention of 5 HK-based publishing professionals . . . excerpt from Memtimin Hoshur’s This Is Not A Dream (بۇ چۈش ئەمەس) . . . Dhaka Art Summit censors Tibetan exhibit at request of China's ambassador . . . annual round-up of writing by minority authors published at Chinawriter.com.cn. . . . Pathlight to appear in Arabic, Korean and Spanish . . . Ai Weiwei plans Berlin memorial to drowned refugees . . . profiling the Hui in Ningxia
Frances Weightman, of Writing Chinese, Leeds University, UK, has sent this UPDATE: "Our 2nd Bai Meigui Chinese-English Translation Competition (run this year in collaboration with the ever so fabulous Read Paper Republic) is open for entries and we are delighted to announce that we once again can offer the winner a full bursary to this summer's Translate in the City literary translation workshop at City University, London. We are grateful to the White Rose East Asia Centre for their generosity in facilitating this. The winning entry will also be published (details to follow). The deadline for entries is Wednesday 9th March, so plenty of time if you've not yet started.
The text this time is a short piece of reportage by Li Jingrui with all sorts of interesting bits to challenge even seasoned translators! So – do take up the challenge and click this link for more details on the text and how to enter.
By Nicky Harman, February 14 '16, 1:50a.m.
Manga Formosa: The Wild World of Taiwanese Comics
Although comics and cartoons (known in Mandarin as manhua) have existed as form of popular entertainment in Taiwan for at least a century, in comparison to Japanese manga they are almost completely unknown to your everyday English-speaking comics fan.
So, following custom in many places on the internet, we thought it
would be nice to do an end-of-the-year what-we’ve-been-up-to
retrospective, now that 2015 is nearly over and 2016 is right… What’s
that? 2015 already over? Not in our neighborhood! As far as we’re
concerned, these are the last days of Yi Wei (乙未), and come Monday
we’ll be entering Bing Shen (丙申), the Year of the Fire Monkey (hence
the excerpt from Journey to the West, aka “Monkey”, that we just
published on Read Paper Republic). None of this newfangled Gregorian
tomfoolery around here. We might consider the Julian calendar… but no.
What have we been up to over the past lunar year? Here’s a brief
rundown:
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 8 '16, 11:15a.m.
I've just updated my guide.
This 民族题材文学 category includes writing — regardless of the author’s ethnicity — in which non-Han culture, motifs or characters play an important role. But the great majority of the works listed were penned by a member of one of China’s minority ethnic groups. There are entries for fiction (and a bit of poetry) touching on the Bai, Evenki, Hui, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Manchu, Miao, Mongolian, Lahu, Lisu, Oirat, Seediq, Tibetan, Uyghur, Xiongnu and Yi peoples. Taiwan fiction is included, and the Tibetan section now features 25 entries. Unless noted, the original is in Chinese and the translation is in English. But I’ve also included a handful of renditions into French, Spanish and Japanese.
By Bruce Humes, February 3 '16, 11:09p.m.
Below is the announcement of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) translation prize for 2016, featuring prose and poetry selections from the Chinese. I'll be acting as judge of entries for the A Yi prose bit.
See below for details (keep in mind this is open to Australian citizens only…):
The Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) now invites entries for the AALITRA Translation Prize.
The AALITRA Translation Prize aims to acknowledge the wealth of
literary translation skills present in the Australian community.
Prizes are awarded for a translation of a selected prose text and for
a translation of a selected poem, with the focus on a different
language each time the prize is offered.
In 2016, the focus language is Chinese. The prose text for translation
is by A Yi (阿乙). The poetry text is by Rong Rong (荣荣). Each text
is available from our
website.
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 2 '16, 1:27a.m.
Mapping Mongolian Music
Word from On High: Officially Recommended Reading about China’s non-Han Peoples
Their publication is quite an undertaking – several entries on the list consist of 10 volumes or more – and shows that the authorities are spending serious money on related projects. The list includes books in Bai, Dai, Dong, Hani, Jingpo, Kazakh, Korean, Kyrgyz, Miao, Mongolian, Naxi, Lahu, Lisu, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, Zaiwa and Zhuang, as well as bilingual texts and those wholly in Mandarin.
NY'er: South Korea's Promotion of its Literature
Today, the government is not only encouraging young people to read but also trying to get non-Koreans to read Korean books. Across the street from Gwanghwamun Square, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea recently held its fourteenth annual workshop for the translation and publication of Korean literature. With a budget of ten million dollars and eighty employees, L.T.I. Korea—a subsidiary of Korea’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport—is dedicated to increasing the circulation of Korean literature in translation around the world. For 2015’s conference, on the “Global Promotion of K-Books” (think K-pop, but for books), the L.T.I. flew in publishers, translators, editors, and lawyers from the United States, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and the U.K.
Review of The Cowshed in NYRB
By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.
I'd always assumed that one of the Chinese words for avocado – 鳄梨, or "alligator pear" – was something made up by Chinese wordsmiths who were coming into contact with the funny fruit for the first time. Now, after reading an article on the Washington Post about restaurant menus in the US from a hundred years ago, I learn that "alligator pear" was something made up by… US wordsmiths who were coming into contact with the funny fruit for the first time. Who knew!?
Now can someone tell me the origins of 牛油果?
Edit: And I spelled 鳄 wrong...
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 29 '16, 3:48a.m.
Ethnic ChinaLit Roundup for end January 2016
Short items re: the Kyrgyz epic, Manas (玛纳斯史诗); a new "Tibetan" font; Zhao Liang's documentary Behemoth about mining in Inner Mongolia; and Tujia folklorist Sun Jiaxiang (孙家香).
Kickstarter campaign for PEN's Passages translation project
Passages intends to [explore] the literary and narrative trends of some of the world’s least translated territories. Each issue will be co-edited by local editors with knowledge of the most current and relevant arts movements to publish exciting new fiction, poetry, essays, graphic narratives, and new literary forms being developed. We hope that the series will eventually turn into a positive way to bring compelling new projects to English-reading audiences and publishers.
If we meet our modest target of $5500, we’ll be able to cover some of the production costs for future issues and convince our anonymous seed funder that there’s a place in the literary community for a project like this.
While the rest of us are sleeping, the Paper Republic Science Elves are hard at work updating our database of Chinese authors, books, translations, and publications. We've made a few bits of visible progress recently, to which the Science Elves would like to call to your attention.
The first change is that we've consolidated some of the database pages: it used to be that original Chinese works, their translations, and respective publications of the two, all had their own separate pages in the database. That led to a sort of round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush situation as you clicked from one page to another, and though this amused the Science Elves very much, it was largely unhelpful for the rest of us. This various information is now gathered into more comprehensive pages, where you can see more, while clicking less (for instance see Feng Tang's Beijing Beijing. We've tried to provide redirects for old URLs, so none of your links go broken.
The second change is the introduction of the publications search page, where you can search through publications listed in the database. You can reach this page from the link top and center. For the past few years, we've been compiling lists of "Chinese literature translated and published in 20XX", which has meant quite a bit of manual labor for the people involved. The whole point of having a database, of course, is that you can spit out information automatically, so why not let you do the searching yourself? You can now find publications by year, language, zone, format…
There will be more coming in the future – the database is already quite extensive, and we'll be adding more entry points and search features over the coming months. The Science Elves are dedicated to bringing us into the 1990s, at least, and the 2000s are within reach!
In the meantime, I'll see if I can rouse the Design Elves…
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 25 '16, 12a.m.
“That Damned Thing She Said”: four short stories from China to celebrate International Women's Day, in the series "Wanderlust: Great Literature from Around the World".
Read Paper Republic are partnering with Free Word Centre, London, to run a speed-bookclubbing evening on Monday 14 March 2016, 6:45pm. The discussion groups will be led by Nicky Harman, Helen Wang, Emily Jones and Roddy Flagg. Further information and booking on the Free Word events page: https://www.freewordcentre.com/events/detail/tdtss-china.
By Nicky Harman, January 24 '16, 3:31p.m.
Tsai Ing-wen’s post-election response on her Facebook page to a barrage of postings criticizing her stand in favor of Taiwan’s independence:
这个国家伟大的地方就在于，每一个人都有做自己的权利.
Various media have translated as follows:
The greatness of this country lies in that everyone has the right to be oneself.
The greatness of this country lies in how every single person can exercise their rights.
How would you render?
By Bruce Humes, January 23 '16, 8:02p.m.
Grass-Mud Horse Quiz 2015: Test Your Netizen Slang
Ten questions (and answers) for those who believe themselves slang-savvy. Here's an example:
- What is a rare but welcome hue for the often-smoggy Beijing skies?
A) Chai Jing blue
B) Daddy Xi sapphire
C) APEC blue
D) Olympic azure
Awards for Xinjiang Fiction in Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongolian and Kyrgyz
Cao Wenxuan shortlisted for 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Awards
The Hans Christian Andersen Award is the highest international distinction given to authors and illustrators of children's books. Given every other year by IBBY, the Hans Christian Andersen Awards recognize lifelong achievement and are given to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children's literature.
FIRST: the translation summer school at City University London will run again this year and there will be a Chinese-to-English option: Translate in the City, Literary Translation in Practice, 11th - 15th July 2016. As the blurb says: "An immersion course in literary translation into English across genres, taught by leading literary translators and senior academics, with plenty of opportunities for networking with publishers, teachers and each other."
Save the date if you're interested. More details to follow.
SECOND: Don't forget the Leeds University Writing Chinese translation competition. The post with all the details follows this one.
By Nicky Harman, January 19 '16, 7:05a.m.
Writing Chinese (Leeds University White Rose Centre) and READ PAPER REPUBLIC are jointly running the 2016 Bai Meigui Translation Competition. Launched on 7th November 2015, the competition free to enter, and is open to anyone, from any country, with an interest in Chinese-English translation. The winning translation will be published as one of the READ PAPER REPUBLIC short story series. Click here for further details, and here, for the text. The deadline is 29th February 2016 and the judges are Dave Haysom, Nicky Harman and Helen Wang.
More…
By Nicky Harman, January 19 '16, 6:57a.m.
Asian Books Blog: Book of the Lunar Year
Asian Books Blog runs its own literary award: The Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar Year. The winner, for the Year of the Ram / Goat, now drawing to a close, will be announced on February 7, Chinese New Year’s Eve for the upcoming Year of the Monkey.
Books are eligible if they are both reasonably new, and if they featured in Asian Books Blog during the given lunar year – this because news of new books sometimes takes a while to trickle through to Asia. Anthologies are eligible. Reissues are not eligible. Books by regular contributors to Asian Books Blog are not eligible.
The Fang Mu Eastern Crimes Series (by Lei Mi) - reviewed by Anna Gustafsson Chen
The three books by Lei Mi - Profiler, Skinner's Box and The Blade of Silence - have been translated into English by Gabriel Ascher, Gaines Post and Holger Nahm, respectively.
Anna's review' is in Swedish (try google translate or similar to get an idea of what she thinks of them!). This series is getting 4 to 5 stars on amazon, goodreads, etc.
Excerpt: Hong Ke's Xinjiang Novel, "Urho"
Hong Ke’s novel, Urho (乌尔禾, 红柯著), is set during the 1960s in the Zungharian Basin at the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert. This remote and rugged area of Xinjiang was once a favored hunting ground for the Mongol Khans when they ruled Cathay. A Han soldier back from the Korean front — dubbed “Hailibu” by the locals after the legendary Mongolian hero graced with the gift of understanding animal speech — runs a sheep ranch for the Xinjiang Construction Corps.
Once again, we are reminded that poetry matters in China. And, equally interesting, that translation of poetry matters.
Feng Tang, author of Beijing, Beijing (北京北京 冯唐著), has apparently crossed the lines of decency with his new translation of verse by China's favorite foreign poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Just in case the world didn't know about this travesty, the Party's English mouthpiece, China Daily, has published an essay, Lust in Translation, about the “testosterone-driven” translator's very personal take on the work of this Bengali poet.
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By Bruce Humes, December 24 '15, 7:28p.m.
